Monday, July 20, 2015

‘There is No Racism in Russia Just as There was No Sex in the USSR’

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 20 – Xenophobia has
long been characteristic of Russia, Leonid Storch says, but Russians when
accused of racism get angry and say that they have a positive attitude toward
all nationalities, even those they refer to with terms members of those groups find
offensive.

Nowhere in Russia have been such
manifestations of racism more frequent in recent years than among football fans
who routinely refer to blacks, North Caucasians, Central Asians and others in
ugly ways; and nowhere has that become a bigger issue for Moscow that fears
such actions will cost it the right to host the World Cup in 2018.

Consequently, media controlled by
the Russian government have tried to play down such episodes in the hopes that
if they don’t talk about these things, no one will notice, but television
viewers can see how the fans behave and the fans themselves now routinely take
to social media to express their horrific views.

In his own Livejournal account,
Storch, a Russian scholar who now teaches in Thailand, not only lists some of
the terms of abuse Russians direct at an increasing number of ethnic minorities
generally but discusses in some detail recent outbursts of racism at Russian
football matches (leonidstorch.livejournal.com/60894.html).

Last week, at a match between Moscow’s
Spartak Team and Ufa (the capital of Bashkortostan), Russian fans started
shouting that a Ghanaian player on the Ufa squad was “an ape. Emmanuel Freemond
responded by giving them the finger.The
Russian judge expelled him from the competition.

Russian “official and semi-official
persons condemned” what Freemond had done, but Sports Minister Mutkov “called
on society not to focus too much attention on the incident lest Russian fans
acquire the reputation of racists and a new scandal undermine the image of
Russia before the 2018 World Championship.”

The minister’s words, however, did nothing
to keep Russian fans from expressing racist remarks on websites like euro-football.ru and sport-express.ru;
and Storch provides a selection of their comments, each more racist,
unspeakable and thus unrepeatable than the last. It perhaps says enough that
one Russian fan has as his screen name, Rommel, after the Nazi general.

This is hardly the first such case, Storch says, pointing
to others over the last several years. But notes that “for some reasons,
xenophobia especially flourishes on the basis of patriotism. The more calls to ‘love
Russia’ circulate and to ‘defend it from its enemies’ are heard, the more often
people are beating for the wrong color of their skin or the shape of their
nose.”

“I
don’t know,” he continues, “whether patriotism is ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’
But it certainly is NOT” or at least should not involve “hatred for other peoples.”Unfortunately, in Russia, it all too often
does. But Russians will continue to insist that “all the same there is no
racism in Russia, just as [in Soviet times] they insisted that there was no sex
or prostitution.”

And as if what Storch documents
weren’t bad enough, today’s news features the story that Russian fans have
selected as Miss Russian Football League Olga Kuzkova whose VKontakte site
shows her giving the Nazi salute and indicating that “it is a good thing” that
Jews and other minorities “burn in the ovens” (svoboda.org/content/article/27137894.html).